Sorry the quality of the video is a little lack luster. My main priority is recording data so this was something I had to awkwardly multitask! I'm happy to answer any questions the video raises, please ask!

Good question Alex. MRI's are really useful in human behavioral cognitive studies because they can produce an image of the brain as it is working through something, say looking at a photo of a loved one vs something scary. We don't have this option for our birds because we can't put them in a machine and expect them to respond to a stimulus in the moment. There's scientific and ethical reasons this wouldn't work. But the PET scan allows us to inject a bird with a time sensitive tracer, show them something while they're in the relative safety of their cage, and then knock them out and visualize what was happening five minutes ago while they were awake and seeing that thing. In this way we can retrospectively look inside the bird's brain. Then they can wake up, recover and be released.

Thank you Scot! We appreciate your advocacy. I enjoyed reading your post, I think you did an excellent job highlighting a major challenge to the study of animal behavior: project human paradigms and constraints on the actions of animals. My one note was that, although I agree that the trouble with lab studies is that they are hard to apply to behaviors in the field, I want to underscore that I am also doing a purely field experiment where I'm monitoring how wild birds respond to the same things we'll eventually test in the lab. I detailed this on the 'abstract' portion of the site. Thanks again for the plug!

Hi Gary, thanks for your support and for the excellent questions! I'll answer them one by one.
1. We try our best to spread the experimental sites far enough apart that a bird is only tested one time (i.e isn't flying from funeral to funeral). The birds tested in the field and those tested in the lab will be from two different populations.
2. Relates to question one. Theoretically, they shouldn't be aware that it is being used multiple times. Same goes for the lab studies.
3. It does not appear that way to us, but it is possible.
4. My vehicle could be recognized but this is a good thing! For each experiment there is a daily feeder, me, whose car we might expect the birds to learn. On stimulus days there is a 2nd "dangerous" volunteer who only participates once. Even if the birds happen to see their car again, it shouldn't make any difference because it's a different person from the one who's feeding them.
Cheers,
Kaeli